Comparing R to smoking

Using R is a bit akin to smoking. The beginning is difficult, one may get headaches and even gag the first few times. But in the long run, it becomes pleasurable and even addictive. Yet, deep down, for those willing to be honest, there is something not fully healthy in it.

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11 thoughts on “Comparing R to smoking”

I think its only pleasurable if you have not already tried other dynamic, high-level languages. So, provided you have not done mushrooms and crack, you will get a great deal of pleasure out of smoking.

Showing my age, I got to the point that S-Plus was pleasurable, mostly because of the novel mental gymnastics involved in avoiding explicit loops. On the other hand, my family thinks my taste in puzzles verges on masochism.

I’m not sure about the extreme of addiction. Maybe if I were doing a lot of EDA

Hi, thank you for your posts, they are very informative. I am beginning to teach R for undergraduate students in Economics. I intend them to be power users and able to eventually write small functions and scripts, and I hope they never get lung cancer for that. Which main textbook would you recommend for the course? I am between “R in Action” (Kabacoff), “The R Primer” (Ekstrom) and “R Cookbook” (Teetor). Thank you in advance for your input.

Fabricio: Please see my review of R in Action. I compare it to Art of R Programming. Maybe that could help you decide at least between those two books. It depends on whether data analysis or programming is more important to you.